Berkshire’s earnings jump
WARREN Buffett has said the hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded bailouts of corporate America will eventually pay off.
But he thinks they shouldn’t pay off for the wealthy people whose carelessness or ignorance made them necessary.
In his annual letter to shareholders of his Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett offered acerbic criticism of financial industry chiefs and directors whose poor risk control nearly ran their companies into the ground.
He said that while these often-wealthy individuals “still live in grand style,” it is the ordinary shareholders who have borne most of the burden of such failures, sometimes seeing more than 90 per cent of their holdings wiped out.
The “Oracle of Omaha” spoke out while revealing his own company’s book value jumped 19.8 per cent year on year to $84,487 per share.